Modern Mythology

Dr. Edmund Roach, MD
Author of “The Kingdom of Heaven Is at Hand”
October 2008

Before devoting ourselves to the study of Biblical Prophecy,many modern men and women must first be convinced that it is worth their while to do so. The following discussion is aimed at them, with the hope that they will venture further within.

According to New and Old Testament scripture the end of this age is a time when great deception and delusion is upon our world. Many of our modern assumptions have helped to create these delusions and to blight the minds and souls of innumerable, unwitting victims over hundreds of years.
Ideas have power. They influence our every choice and decision. They can steer us toward love or hate, life or death, anger or forgiveness. They pervade our minds unperceived and unquestioned. Beneath the surface, out of sight they filter every thing we see, hear, and believe. Had we been born in a different time or a different place, those assumptions would be entirely different and so would have been our minds, ideas, and lives. We are largely products of the culture into which we are born. In order to see more clearly we need to become aware of and to remove the modern biases through which we have been made to see.
Plato taught us that the material world was but the shadow of a greater spiritual reality that lay beyond the senses. In direct opposition, modern man teaches us that spiritual reality is but an illusion cast by matter. Atoms and particles of matter are the only true reality.
The origin of the universe is currently felt to be the Big Bang which resulted in the origin of time, space and matter out of nothing. Life is thought to eventually arise through the random operation of natural laws on lifeless matter over time. Given enough time, complex life forms are thought to have evolved as a result of random changes in living matter that cause either benefit or detriment to the organism. Through the process of competition and the survival of the fittest the best of these changes are preserved for the next generation and the worst are discarded. Gradually simple life becomes more and more complex as the random beneficial changes accumulate over time. In this way biologic evolution eventually results in the development of brains that are complex enough to give rise to consciousness and mind. This is called the theory of Darwinian evolution. In summary the current paradigm is that the universe suddenly comes into existence for reasons unknown and then evolves through natural law into the vast and complex universe we see around us today. The status quo scientific establishment believes that all phenomenon can be or will be explained within this paradigm. The philosophic result of this scientific belief states that we live in an accidental and random universe without intrinsic meaning or value, other than that which we arbitrarily choose to give it. God becomes an unnecessary explanatory element within this paradigm. He is a figment of the human imagination that can now be replaced by scientific rationalism. He is a mere "opiate of the masses," keeping the ignorant and uniformed from getting too unruly. Man’s hopes and dreams, struggles and convictions are reduced to the specific arrangement of his atomic constituents. There is no good and evil, no right and wrong. There are no Absolutes to measure by. As a result man becomes the measure of all things. He is the standard. He is the arbiter. He is in short god. Science replaces religion and becomes the solvent for all of man’s problems. Morals and ethics are replaced by power and politics.
Powerful Man, by his natural right rules over weaker man. Ann Rand's and Friederick Nietzsche's new superman has been born. The results have been an unimaginable scale of human suffering and pain for much of the world. Philosophic materialism has provided the intellectual justification for the removal of spiritual reality from human philosophy. It has spawned the ideologies of modern man. Secular humanism, communism, socialism, capitalism are systems of human thought that promise to hold the answers to human life. Man has not progressed a long way from ancient times. He has gone from the worship of idols to the worship of ideologies. Idols are a physical figment of the imagination and ideologies are an intellectual figment of the imagination. Despite the far reaching effects of philosophic materialism few seem to know (including scientists) that modern science itself has already decisively destroyed the foundations of materialism. Matter has been discovered to be a myth, better described as vibrations in a field of energy than as a solid entity. Quantum mechanics tells us that those "solid particles" that we thought we understood can go through two holes in a wall at the same time. Furthermore, the results of our experiments are subject to change according to whether or not we observe what happens! We also find that particles located at opposite ends of the universe affect the behavior of one another through instantaneous connections that we do not understand in the least. These results and many more like them tell us that our models of reality and the assumptions we have put into them are false. The universe is far stranger than our simple ideas have presumed. In fact, our concepts and models regarding reality will never be able to completely capture the object of its study. Finite mind has to break reality into parts in order to study it. As a result we loose information that is contained in the whole. The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. Reality is transcendent to any idea that we may have about it. Reality is to mind as a sphere is to a circle. It is a higher dimensional entity. We unknowingly stand in the midst of the miraculous. Our own theories are telling us so. Sadly, despite the recent findings of science most of our scientists, intellectuals, and leaders continue to form their ideas about man and his world through the distorting lens of philosophic materialism. We flatten out and crush the mystery that surrounds our every experience.
Another important scientific idea that has been overthrown is the one of randomness and the accidental nature of universe existence. We now know that the constants of nature such as the mass of an electron and proton have to be very finely tuned and coordinated in order to make life possible. If one were to change any of the constants of nature by even a very slight amount the universe would be incapable of supporting life. The probability of this fine-tuning happening by accident is very close to zero. Even hard core scientists are looking at this and saying that our universe certainly appears to be designed to support the eventual existence of life. Scientists that would like to avoid this conclusion posit that there could be an infinite number of parallel universes and that we just happen to live in the one that can miraculously support life. Why such a fear of admitting the obvious? Is it because atheism, secular humanism, philosophic materialism and the entire modern worldview rests on the supposed accidental randomness of the universe?
Randomness is also under attack within Darwin's theory of the evolution of life. Modern science has shown life to be unimaginably more complex than was once supposed. It can now be shown that random Darwinian evolution is mathematically impossible within the constraints of a finite universe. The improbabilities are so enormous it would require a well nigh infinite amount of time to happen. However the universe appears to be quite finite in time and space. If life did not randomly evolve then it must have an element of design. There is that nasty word again. The religion of naturalistic science is not holding up to scrutiny. I think that the final theory of the evolution of life will contain elements of random chance, natural selection, and design. Reality is subtle, not black and white.
And so, we can see how our "science" has led us astray... We can explain the universe. We can control it. We can bring about our own peace, prosperity, and happiness. Man no longer needs God. Man is god. This is the grand experiment that is being played out in the world today. God is a good parent. He knows that His children must learn from their own mistakes. When we reject truth we are destined to believe a lie. When our darkest days arrive we will ask Him why He allows the suffering that we ourselves have chosen. We will learn that error is guaranteed when imperfect beings are bestowed with freewill choice. Fortunately, even our errors work to our benefit in this universe of a loving God. Like a teenager, mankind is growing up by the seat of his mistakes. Maturity takes time and experience. God supplies the time and the experiences. Man supplies the desire; the desire to embrace all that is beautiful, true and good; the desire for perfection; the desire to know and do God's will and the desire to follow His way of Mercy and Justice.
We should not discard the truths of spiritual reality simply because modern experts and scholars in their latest passing fancy, tell us that they are not worth investigating. For instance, many modern atheistic biblical scholars refuse to acknowledge that hundreds of detailed Old Testament biblical prophecies have in fact come true. The prophecies of Daniel are so detailed and so accurate that modern scholars' only explanation is that they were written after the fact despite ample evidence to the contrary. When facts are inconvenient we sweep them under the rug. We have too much invested in our worldview to be bothered by the truth. We should not be so easily fooled. We need to investigate for ourselves. Truth today is buried underneath the slick and the superficial. Almost everything popular and in the public eye is false. Almost everything we think we know is untrue.
The final and permanently decisive nail in the coffin of a mechanical, reductionistic universe is Godel’s incompleteness theorem. It is the ultimate critique of pure reason. Godel proved mathematically that there will always be mathematical truths that can not be logically deduced from prior mathematical truths and assumptions. This means that the intuitive mind is and always will be an essential element in the discovery of mathematical truth. The need for intuition can not be eliminated by pure reason. Reason is analytical. It breaks things into parts in order to understand the whole. Intuition is the other mode of mind function that grasps the whole directly. Reason and intuition work together to produce the products of the human mind. Reason lays the groundwork and eliminates inconsistencies and errors. Intuition makes the leaps off the platforms established by reason. Reason once again eliminates errors and inconsistencies from the intuitive ideas. Therefore Godel’s incompleteness theorem leads directly to a new philosophy of mind. Pure reason is dethroned. Intuition comes before reason and goes after it. Intuition is both a valid and necessary mode of mind function of all human beings. Understanding can never be merely reduced to reason and logic. Computers can never be intelligent in the way that human beings can be intelligent. They lack intuition, the other modality of mind that complements reason. Reason and logic validates the outer world of objective experience. Intuition validates the inner world of subjective experience. Intuition grasps the whole. Reason grasps the part. Faith is the intuition that the inner universe of spiritual experience is real. Science is founded on the intuition that the external universe of the senses is real. Science is the search for objective truth in the external world. Religion is the search for subjective truth in the internal world. Subjective truth and objective truth are two sides of one coin, one reality. They should not contradict one another, neither should they constrain one another. We see with two eyes, one of faith and one of reason. Together they give us the perception of depth, rather than the flat one-eyed vision of rational materialism.
Matter is real. Spirit is real. Faith and reason are complements. Brilliant scientists can and many times are devout believers. The "either/or" dichotomy of Western Philosophy is being replaced by the "and" philosophy of tomorrow. Science and Religion. Faith and Reason. Spirit and Matter. Outer and Inner. In summary, matter is the lower dimensional projection of a higher dimensional spiritual reality. As Plato said, matter is the shadow of spirit and not the other way around. We should have listened.